SEO guides and experts around the web often advise to clean up all unrelated backlinks from your profile by disavowing them or asking webmasters to remove them.

But disavowing all unrelated backlinks isn’t always a good idea.

In fact, you should take a much closer look at these unrelated links before deciding on any next step.

There’s a chance you might be giving up gold!

The relevant unrelated backlink VS the spammy counterpart

A backlink can be unrelated to your niche but still be relevant (and thus still worth having).

For example, you might be wondering if that natural medicine site linking to your marketing tool site is still a relevant backlink.

But think about it:

If the site owner has used your tool to boost their SEO, then that’s a legit (and natural) backlink in its own right.

Whoever said that a natural medicine site can’t benefit from a top-notch marketing tool?

So you see, that’s one good example of an unrelated backlink that’s still genuine and worthy of keeping.

The advice to clean up all unrelated links should be taken with a grain of salt. It also helps to understand where it comes from.

The idea is that, typically, it’s very hard for websites in completely different niches or industries to naturally link to one another, because of how difficult and rare it is to find a context that make sense.

How hard is it for a ping pong website to link back to a surgeon’s website? Very hard, I’d say.

Unless the content is about a ping pong player who was operated on by that surgeon after injuring themselves during a match.

See what I mean?

On the other hand, a spammy unrelated backlink exists only to create SEO juice, with no value for the user.

One of my blogs that I recently retired has been the victim of a lot of these, all thanks to some spammer who had the clever idea of filling my old comment section with junk and then linking to those comments from everywhere on the web.

Here are some examples of those spam links from my Monitor Backlinks account:

As you can see, they’re clearly unrelated to my site as well as spammy, ultimately just there to add pollution to the already polluted web.

So, make sure you carefully investigate any “unrelated” backlinks before adding them to your disavow file. Know the difference between an unrelated relevant backlink and an unrelated spammy backlink.

And hey, if that unrelated backlink is genuine and actually makes sense for the user (like in the natural medicine and ping pong example above), there’s absolutely no need for it to go!

Now, with that out of the way, let’s find out how to disavow those links that do need to go.

Disavow File Generator: How to Use Monitor Backlinks for Easy Link Removal (+ Best Practices to Speed Things Up)

Generating a disavow file by hand, URL by URL, can be a long and time-consuming task.

Monitor Backlinks is a powerful backlink tracker and disavow file generator that puts all your backlink data at your fingertips. With just a few clicks from within the tool, you can create a Google-ready disavow file that’s ready to go.

The tutorial below will help you get this done real quick, and if you don’t have a Monitor Backlinks account to follow along, you can pick up a free trial here to make full use of all the features without paying a cent.

How to Generate a Disavow File with Monitor Backlinks

You do this in just a handful of steps.

Log in to your Monitor Backlinks account and go to Your Links from the left sidebar:

These are all your backlinks. Browse through them and identify the toxic ones that you want to disavow.

Decide if you want to disavow single URLs or entire domains/subdomains (not subfolders)

The disavow file must be encoded in UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII and have a .TXT extension

Add comments to the disavow file by adding a # before the line

The best thing you can do is follow Google’s tips and the insight from webmasters (including myself) who have been there, done that.

Here are three best practices to keep in mind:

1. Add comments that’ll be helpful to the future you

The handling of disavow files is completely automated and no Google employee will read your comments.

However, you may want to keep track of your efforts and document your cleanup activity to help remind yourself of why you sent this disavow request and what these links have done to damage your site in the SERPs.

You can use the comment lines in your disavow file to document these things.

For example, you might add the following text to the disavow file that Monitor Backlinks generated for you (editing a few lines, too):

# On 2019-04-08, all of the following links were found to be damaging our website and consequently marked as toxic.

# We found that they were generated by spammers who linked to the comments they left on our website while unattended.

Also, add comments for the domains and URLs to be disavowed:

## Links created by spammers who linked to the spam comments they left on our website

And explain how you attempted to contact the webmaster or not, and why (a reminder that you’ve done the work):

## We have tried to contact the webmasters 4 times but they didn’t respond.

Here’s a screenshot of my edited disavow file including the best practices above:

2. Submit the disavow file as soon as you spot toxic links

Naturally, try to reach out to the webmasters first.

But if you get no response and the links are truly toxic, generate a disavow file and submit it to Google as soon as possible.

Being proactive when the stakes are high is never the wrong route to take.

If you haven’t been able to find a webmaster’s contact information anywhere on the web, and the link is a cause for concern but you don’t want to use a disavow file just yet, you do have another option:

You can contact the webmaster’s host and explain the situation.

Find their web host with a free service like WhoIsHostingThis.com or Hosting Checker, and send them a message. If you’re lucky, the web host might agree to forward your message to the webmaster and solicit a response.

But of course, if even that fails, then go with the disavow tool.

Disavow File Generator Wrap-up

As you can see, Monitor Backlinks’ disavow file generator can make your life considerably easier.

All you have to do is select the right backlinks to disavow (only those that really need to go and that you have no other way to get rid of), and add comments to tell Google why you’re doing what you’re doing.

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